My most painful experience in Russia was a visit to Perm-36, the only one of Stalin’s forced-labour camps to have been preserved, in 1998.I was in Perm, a city in the Ural, to take part in a seminar of the Moscow School of Political Studies.Founded by the remarkable Lena Nemirovs

The tragic exodus of people from war-torn Syria and surrounding countries challenges the world’s reason and sympathy.Since 2011, some 4 million people have fled Syria, with millions more internally displaced.Syria’s neighbours — Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey — currently house the va

Most rich countries now have millions of “working poor” — people whose jobs do not pay enough to keep them above the poverty line, and whose wages therefore have to be subsidised by the state. These subsidies take the form of tax credits.The idea is a very old one.

The Chinese are the most historically minded of peoples.In his conquest of power, Mao Zedong used military tactics derived from Sun Tzu, who lived around 500BC; Confucianism, dating from around the same time, remains at the heart of China’s social thinking, despite Mao’s ruthless

In 2011, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman characterised conservative discourse on budget deficits in terms of “bond vigilantes” and the “confidence fairy”.Unless governments cut their deficits, the bond vigilantes will put the screws to them by forcing up interest rates.

Economic historian Niall Ferguson reminds me of the late Oxford historian A.J.P.

Until a few years ago, economists of all persuasions confidently proclaimed that the Great Depression would never recur. In a way, they were right.

To read “The Samuelson Sampler” in the shadow of the Great Recession is to gain a glimpse into the mindset of a bygone era. The sample is of the late Paul Samuelson’s weekly columns for the magazine Newsweek from 1966-1973. Samuelson, a Nobel laureate, was the

There is a growing apprehension among Britain’s financial pundits that Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is not nearly as determined to cut public spending as he pretends to be. He sets himself deadlines to balance the books, but when the date arrives, with the bo